Some years back I posted a short thread on /tg/ about vampire folklore. People seemed to like, and later I posted a much longer version on /x/ as a desperate attempt to keep that board from getting shittier. It didn't work, and while the thread got archived, it's more or less long since forgotten.

I've touched up the information since, and thought I might as well post it here, if anybody is interested it using it as fluff or inspiration. Most of this info comes from a very reliable textbook on vampire traditions by Professor Jan L. Perokowski. Anyway, here goes.

First off, let’s start with appearance. You’ve probably seen lots of movies and pictures of vampires as both inhuman monsters and pale but superhumanly attractive immortals, but to the Slavs, that's not how a vampire looked. A vampire wasn't pale. It didn't have fangs. It didn't even look dead. It looked like a completely normal person. If they were ugly in life, they were ugly in death and the same goes if they were handsome. That, of course, was one of its strengths: anonymity. The only particular tells a vampire had were after it had fed and, if it were dug up, the fact that it hadn't decayed.

One of the most recurrent things about vampire physical traits is what they look like after feeding: swollen. They swell up like ticks, their entire bodies saturated with blood till even their skin was shiny from being stretched taut, and was even kind of reddish. If you saw one stumbling by in the street, gorged with blood, it'd just look like a ruddy faced drunk. If you dug a vampire up the next day, frequently the blood would even be leaking out is nostrils, eyes, and the corners of its mouth.

In fact, one vampire prevention method is to pierce a body with needles before burial. Sounds like a weaker version of staking, right? Not so. The idea was that if the vampire couldn't exist if it had holes in it: the blood it drank would leak out, and the vampire would starve.

Mind you, staking was NOT a way of killing a vampire to the Slavs. It was a preventative step. On the one hand, you were essentially nailing the body to the bottom of the coffin. On the other hand, the heart was considered the most important organ when it comes to blood. How's the vampire going to be able to process the blood it drinks when there's a bigass stake through its heart?

Aside from using needles, as previously mentioned, there was a whole host of ways to prevent a vampire from rising. Some were very clever. The peasants, for example, would bury the coffin upside down: That way, if the vampire tried to dig its way out, it'd be trying to dig up but instead would be actually digging further down. But, you might think, if the vampire had memories from its life, it'd know about that practice, right? That's why they ALSO would sometimes bury the coffin vertically. Thus, if the vampire tried to dig out, he still wouldn't be sure which way to go, because he wouldn’t know which way they had buried him.

>>18442744couldn't they just go the opposite direction of gravity?bury them vertically, head first. let's see them turn around in that little space, and fill the coffin with dirt and shit for even less room to move

They had lots of other measures. Nail the body's clothes to the sides of the coffin. Attach a sickle to the wall of the coffin so the blade rested above the body's throat: If it tried to sit up, it'd decapitate itself. In later years in Romania, it was traditional to shoot a bullet through the coffin, body and all, before burial.In the Caras district of Romania, there was a tradition of burying the deceased with a bottle of hard whiskey. The idea was that the vampire would get shitfaced and be unable to get out of his grave. Even if he did, it was thought instead of going home to attack his family members, he'd instead slouch to the bar for a refill.

Alternatively, there was a belief that if you buried the corpse with a bottle of wine and later believed he had come back as a vampire, you could dig him up and the family members could drink the wine, and this would render them immune to the vampire's predations.

Frankly, the second one seems like a bad idea to me. Wouldn't the vampire be MORE pissed because they stole his booze?

And while there was also a lot of variation on how to permanently destroy a vampire, it always came down to two things: Complete dismemberment, followed by burning. And even burning doesn't always work, as show in a story about a vampire and a Cossack I'll get to in a bit.

Speaking of, there is a lot of weird logic associated with vampires, but if you look close you can often see the underlying reasoning.

For example, in some countries a vampire could be created if a cat jumped over the corpse before burial. A bit odd, right? Well, apparently there's a widespread Slavic belief that the human soul sometimes appears as a tiny silver mouse with blue eyes. As such, the cat is an evil spirit attempting to eat the human soul and replace it, thereby animating the corpse. Thus, the logic of the cat thing is obviously based on superstition but it's still a reasoned out cause-and-effect.Other weird one you see all the time is that vampires are compelled to count seeds, so peasants will fill the coffin with millet, shown here, or spread it around the entrances to their house. The vampire will be so busy gathering the seeds, the sun will come up and he'll flee. It’s strange, but consider it a little more closely. Vampires consume LIFE. The book makes clear that they don't just drink blood. Romanian vampires eat hearts, Ruassian/Ukranian vampires eat the flesh of corpses, Bulgarian vampires eat hair, toenail clippings, feces; all byproducts of living things.

A seed is a symbol of potential life, not just for the wheat it could grow into, but also for the life that would allow when humans consume it. As such, the vampire gathers the millet to eat it. Each seed represents life and, to a lesser extent, units of time (each one representing the lifespan of the plant that could grow from it). It's not as good as blood and flesh, but it's still sustenance the vampire can use.

I know the explanation for the seed thing is kinda weird, so here's a slightly more straightforward idea. Ever heard of vampire watermelons and pumpkins? Sounds weird, right? It's a real belief in Romania. They're supposed to writhe around at night and seem to ooze blood.

Well, the Slavs believe that a person or certain objects (especially lawful possessions) could become an unclean spirit. There's actually a similar belief in the Shinto religion of Japan. They say that if an inanimate object manages to exist for over 100 years, then it acquires a soul. Generally, their behavior and function is influenced by what they were designed for. For example, old fashioned Japanese umbrellas were supposed to be so rickety and hard to open and close that they were belligerent and aggressive when they came to life and liked to choke people.

Is it such a weird idea, though? Even today, people assign life to inanimate objects. Naming their cars, boats, computers. Project personalities onto them. It's a similar concept only in the case of vampires, it's a decidedly NEGATIVE sort of life.

What's the personality that animates a vampire? In traditional vampire fiction, it's the same personality that animated it in life. That's where much of the angst and drama comes from, as the person who has been transformed into a vampire grapples with his or her compulsion to kill other people and drink their blood.

But as you can see from the anecdote about the mouse above, that's not entirely how it worked for the people who came up with the modern concept of vampires. Generally, the believed it was an evil spirit that animated the corpse. Now, sure, sometimes it was the spirit of the same person, if they had been evil in life. Sometimes it was the spirit of somebody else, or a flat out demonic spirit, in which case they'd just use the memories of the deceased against the living.

In one folktale, a Cossack fights a Russian vampire to a standstill. Then daylight comes and the vampire isn't destroyed, but is simply rendered inanimate. The Cossack summons the nearby villagers the vampire had been preying on. They build a great bonfire and through the corpse on the fire. But as it burns, the body bursts and thousands of little animals start to crawl out of it. Snakes, crows, maggots, rats, all of them crawl out of the body and try to flee the fire. The villagers kill them with shovels and pitchforks and throw each one back onto the fire. The idea was that each one was a little part of the vampire's evil spirit, and that if even one escaped it could find another body and start the cycle all over again.

Now, one interesting thing you might have wondered about. Earlier, I mentioned that in traditional lore, vampires don't have fangs. So, you might be wondering how they drank blood.

The truth is that they often didn't. When they DID, though, it was often unexplained. When it was, it was gruesome. Some vampires, such as the ones that preyed on cattle, would just lap blood from cuts they made on the side of the animals (either existing ones or ones they made themselves, presumable with whatever sharp implement came to hand). The Romanian strigoi bit into the chest just above the heart to drink blood, and then sometimes chewing his way down and eating the heart itself. In Croatia, they did something similar, but instead of eating your heart they just gnawed on your innards a little. The Russian/Polish/Ukranian vampire, the upir, ate flesh, but also drank blood. He has one of my favorite methods. He carried a bucket around with him. He'd sneak into your house while you slept, yank you out of bed, force you to kneel with your head over the bucket, and then hit you so hard on the back that you coughed up blood, which would fall into the bucket. He'd do this until you died, and then drink the bucket empty.

Some vampires favored suffocation. In some regions they'd be confused with witches (again) or even succubi, and would sit on your chest, steadily growing heavier, until you couldn't breathe. In fact, one other name for vampires in Romania, moroi, is related to "mora" which is the root of "mare" in "nightmare." A mora was a hag or a succubi like demon that paralyzed you and suffocated you in this manner. In the same regions, sometimes the vampires just choked you to death. Sometimes the Bulgarian obour (another type of vampire) would hold your nose shut with one hand, clamp his mouth over yours, and suck out your breath for sustenance.

>>18442839Well, the fang bit is less a hard and fast piece of legend and more a narrative embellishment that became cannon. It's a sign of predators. When you tell a story about a scary guy trying to bite you, you give him fangs, and maybe claws, and scary eyes.

But more often than not, when a vampire was feeding, people just... died. It happened overnight, one by one, starting with the vampire's immediate family (and any animals they owned), then spreading out to friends of the deceased, and then onto everybody else. In one account from Bohemia, the vampire just would go from house to house, knocking on the door, calling out the name of the person who he would kill. The next day, they'd be dead without explanation. In other cases they spread plague and disease, and somehow grew stronger from killing people with it. In a lot of ways, vampires were just personifications of disease. It simply stems from the fact that a vampire was blamed for mysterious deaths, especially many that happened in a row or within the same family, since no other explanation was available.

Keep in mind, that last category does not preclude the blood drinkers or the suffocaters. The whole point of vampires is that people don’t usually catch them in the act. That’s why they’re scary; they can kill with virtual impunity. Modern vampires often have a lot of superpowers, be it shapeshifting, super strength, what have you. With traditional vampires, the mystery and the supernatural quality comes primarily from how they kill. Everything else is secondary.

Might as well get this out of the way; Vlad Dracula never had any legends about him relating him to vampires. Not while he was alive, and not after he was dead. Not until Bram Stoker wrote his book. Now, don't get me wrong. Vlad did some horrendous things. In fact, the book mentions one of his nastier ideas: Take a mother. Take her infant child. Sever one of the mother's breasts. Scrape out the meat inside the severed breast until you have a sort of skin-bag. Sever the infant child's head. Place the sever head inside the hollowed out breast. Impale the whole thing on a stake in front of the mother, while she watches. Spare the mother's life.

Colorful guy. But aside from literary fiction, he doesn't figure in vampire lore. Neither, for that matter, does Elizabeth Bathory, the chick who bathed in the blood of virgins. In her trials she was accused of witchcraft, heresy, and murder, but never of vampirism.

>>18442833Yeah, the OCD is a curious bit of vampire lore that pops up all over the place. Chinese vampire legends have the same feature, where a vampire is compelled to count any rice or salt thrown in front of it, and can't leave until it's finished.

"succubi like" was the key phrase there. The Mora is a somewhat older concept that eventually evolved into the medieval succubus, bust wasn't really the same thing. Sexual exhaustion did sometimes come up as being the cause of death with Mora and their ilk, but less often than crushing/suffocation.

To wrap up I’m going to regale you with a few miscellaneous anecdotes.

In Bulgaria, the vampire is especially weird. According to the Bulgarians, the body never truly reanimates. Instead, the spirit of the dead person first grows a shadow. Then the shadow grows into a sort of amorphous ball of floating, transparent protoplasm that absorbs blood. Then, once it's absorbed enough blood it's able to grow skin, hair, organs, etc, but it only has cartilage for bones. If it lives long enough, it'll finally grow bones, essentially resulting in a perfect clone of the body still rotting in its grave

In fact, if it lives long enough it will no longer need to retreat to the grave and won't have to feed as often. It can even reproduce like a normal human being. What it will do is then move to a new town, where nobody knows its face, and will marry and live like a perfectly normal human. However, any children it has will automatically become vampires upon death, and it still can't enter churches and be repelled by garlic. If towns thought they had a vampire like this in town, they'd get everybody together, dispense garlic, and anyone who refused to eat it was accused of being a vampire.

Hmm. 4chan doesn't seem to like the iamge that went with this one. Oh well. To wrap up I’m going to regale you with a few miscellaneous anecdotes.

In Bulgaria, the vampire is especially weird. According to the Bulgarians, the body never truly reanimates. Instead, the spirit of the dead person first grows a shadow. Then the shadow grows into a sort of amorphous ball of floating, transparent protoplasm that absorbs blood. Then, once it's absorbed enough blood it's able to grow skin, hair, organs, etc, but it only has cartilage for bones. If it lives long enough, it'll finally grow bones, essentially resulting in a perfect clone of the body still rotting in its grave

In fact, if it lives long enough it will no longer need to retreat to the grave and won't have to feed as often. It can even reproduce like a normal human being. What it will do is then move to a new town, where nobody knows its face, and will marry and live like a perfectly normal human. However, any children it has will automatically become vampires upon death, and it still can't enter churches and be repelled by garlic. If towns thought they had a vampire like this in town, they'd get everybody together, dispense garlic, and anyone who refused to eat it was accused of being a vampire.

The nastiest vampire I've heard of is the Nelapsi, which is the word for a vampire in Slovakia.

The Nelapsi has a few curious attributes you don't seem in many other vampire stories. For one, he carries disease, usually the plague, and is so virulent he can wipe out entire herds of cattle or entire villages in his passing. He also has the ability to kill with the evil eye, much like the legendary Basilisk. In fact, the Nelapsi could climb to the top of the tallest building in a village, and could then use this height advantage to kill anyone approaching just by looking at them.

The cherry on the cake? The Nelapsi has two hearts and two souls. This means that even killing him properly will only destroy ONE of these souls, and the other one can flee and animate another corpse somewhere else.

There's no Slovakian stories or anecdotes about destroying a Nelapsi, just ways to ward one off. Frequently, the coffin of a suspected nelapsi was periodically FILLED with millet, hoping to keep him busy. If that didn't work, towns would light "need fires," and odd superstition where every light in the town was extinguished and a single very large fire was lit at the crossroads. This was thought to ward off regular disease as well as vampires. Plagues cattle would be lead between two need fires spaced a distance apart, thus "burning" off the disease in spirit.

Going off that last bit about "need fires" there's another use they have: dealing with ustrels. The ustrel is, essentially, a vampire baby. It's created when a child dies before it can be baptized.

Ustrels seem to prey exclusively on cattle, causing an effect similar to anthrax. What's odd about them is that they blur the line between spirit and corpse, which occurs in a number of vampire stories. When not feeding, the ustrel doesn't go to a grave, it possesses the horn of a bull or the hind leg of a cow in the herd that it’s attacking.

The only way to flush an ustrel out is to lead the cows between two need fires, at which point the ustrel falls off. The peasants then leave it where it is to be devoured by wolves at the crossroads.

And now we get to the bit about wolves. Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of vampires turning into wolves, but in folklore accounts they more often turn into dogs, cats, rats, or owls. Sometimes they even turn into sheep. Wolves? Not so much.

In some cases, like the ustrel above, wolves even seem antithetical to vampires. They destroy them. In Albania, a vampire can be destroyed only once a wolf has bitten its legs off.

Part of the confusion has to do with the fact that, like strigoi, the words for vampire and witch are often confused. And in traditional lore, werewolves were not created by curses, but were in face willing shapeshifters; magicians or witches who intentionally turned into wolves to attack the cattle of their neighbors, or to kill their neighbors themselves.

However, there's also the belief that vampires were often created from the corpses of evil people, IE the sort of people who would turn into werewolves. In short, you could have a witch who was a werewolf who, after dying, could come back as a vampire.

Before the word "vampire" became more popular, the most common word in 19th century literature for a dead man who preyed upon the living to prolong his un-life was initially the Romanian word "strigoi." Now, strigoi is a bit of a vague word. It can mean a vampire and a witch. It's related to the Italian word "strega" which means a witch as well.

They all come from "Strix." The Strix is actually a completely different mythical creature from Roman folklore. The Strix was a vaguely described sort of anthropomorphic screech owl. The Strix was alive and wasn't human, but it drank the blood of babies and disemboweled people to eat their livers and other internal organs. This might explain why the Romanian strigoi also tends to eat the heart of its victim as well as drinking the blood. It also might explain why one of the animals vampires are supposed to frequently transform into is the owl.

For the record, there's no Slavic tradition of vampires turning into bats. That was made up by Bram Stoker. In his time, the "vampire bat" had recently been discovered in South America, and so it seemed a natural addition for "Dracula."

Finally, I wanted to dwell on just what a vampire is. Stories about monsters that prey on humans can be found the world over, including stories about creatures that drink blood. But does that make them vampires?

It's the Slavic countries that gave them to us as a modern concept. Even there it's an inconsistent concept. Is it a walking corpse? Not always. The Bulgarian obour grows itself a new body and leaves its corpse behind. Is it something that drinks blood? No, because a lot of them don't drink blood at all. Some eat flesh. Others somehow just get stronger from the mere act of causing death.

There are a lot of cheap vampire books out there that will list all kinds of monsters from around the world. The penalaggan is one you see a lot. It's a monster that poses as a woman during the day, but becomes a blood drinking monster at night. It's a living monster, though. There's plenty others like it. For example, the Strix tends to show up in such lists as well.

Really, the best definition is this: a dead person who preys on the living and is rooted in Slavic tradition. Otherwise you've just got yourself a zombie.

Right, that's it for me tonight. Hope you guys enjoyed this. I archived the thread if you ever want to look over it again. Should be somewhere around here: http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html

Most of this stuff was found in the works of Professor Jan L. Perokowski.

If you want to look into it yourself, look into his book "The Darkling: a Treatise on Slavic Vampirism" which is a fairly slender, affordable book or, alternatively, “Vampire Lore: From the Writings of Jan Louis Perokowski." It's slightly less common, but it includes "The Darkling" within it. Never buy "Vampires of the Slavs" by him because it's in "Vampire Lore" too and its rare and expensive otherwise. I'm afraid they're all out of print, but Amazon has them. The man was the definitive Western authority on vampires before he retired. To do better, you'd have to go overseas and learn a few new languages.

>>18442839>He'd sneak into your house while you slept, yank you out of bed, force you to kneel with your head over the bucket, and then hit you so hard on the back that you coughed up blood, which would fall into the bucket. He'd do this until you died, and then drink the bucket empty.

You'd be surprised. Sometimes vampires don't seem particularly intelligent, acting almost like ghosts whoa re trapped in routine. Just going through the motions, you know? There's not that many stories where they talk to people.

"The National geographic - vampire forensics" I can't seem to find a link to it at the moment.That indicated that vampires all steamed from people trying to understand/comprehend a combination of rotting and disease.

>why is this dead body full of blood?It's been eating blood>he died, then his family diedRevenant>how to stop a vampirecant eat if it's got a brick in its mouth

Any way I found it interesting to see where some of the myths came from.

The bit about how wolves are sometimes associated with the destruction of vampires reminded me of another /tg/ thread.

We were discussing the fact that most medieval werewolves were thought of as sorcerers who chose to transform into giant wolves for profit or amusement, and wondered what would happen if some peasants paid one to get rid of a vampire problem.

I'm imagining them asking him to deal with a local nelapsi, and this giant wolf has to fight the nelapsi blindfolded in some ruined churchyard.

>>18442823>Drunk Cossack gets into a fight with a Russian>Knocks him out cold as the sun rises>Tells the villagers he is a vampire and throws him on top of a pile of rubbish to burn him.>As it burns the pests in the rubbish run away and the villagers think they are part of the "vampire" >Cossack gets away scot-free, becomes a legend.

>>18442783> In later years in Romania, it was traditional to shoot a bullet through the coffin, body and all, before burial.I once dated a girl from Bulgaria, and she told me once that that's what they did when they buried her grandfather. Some traditions die hard....

I'm reminded of a story John Landis told about his inspiration for the movie "An American Werewolf in London.

Landis came up with the story while he worked in Yugoslavia as a production assistant on the film "Kelly's Heroes". He and a Yugoslavian member of the crew were driving in the back of a car on location when they came across a group of gypsies. The gypsies appeared to be performing rituals on a man being buried so that he would not "rise from the grave." He and his companion were amused by this prospect, but then Landis though to himself "Yeah, but what would we do if the guy actually climbed out of his grave?"